With all eyes locked last week on Colleen Hauser, the Sleepy Eye mother who was on the lam with her ailing 13-year-old son, it was easy to miss the story of another mother fighting the system.

While the stakes in this case are not life and death, Noreen Hulteen also deserves our attention because the ramifications of her battle affect potentially thousands of Minnesota's working women nearing retirement.

On May 18, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, ruled against Hulteen and three other female employees of AT&T. Hulteen, who worked for what was then California-based Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, did what many working women did in the 1960s and 1970s: She had a baby. Because of the birth and a related medical condition requiring surgery, she missed 240 days of work.

AT&T followed its standard policy and granted Hulteen 30 days of paid maternity leave. The other 210 days -- which would have been calculated into her pension had she left for any other medical condition -- were not counted. At the time, few people batted an eye because (listen up, young parents!) it was legal to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace, including firing them on the spot in some cases.

The plot thickened in 1979 with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which mandated that employers treat pregnancy the same as any other temporary disability. So when Hulteen retired in 1994, she assumed that AT&T would credit her for those 210 days. AT&T balked, but in "AT&T vs. Hulteen," the Ninth Circuit Court sided with her.

Last week, the Supreme Court overturned the lower-court ruling, saying that AT&T had no obligation to pay retroactively. How could the telecommunications giant be accused of pregnancy discrimination against Hulteen during the 1970s, the majority reasoned, if the discrimination law wasn't yet on the books?

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who dissented along with Justice Stephen Breyer) didn't hide her frustration that these women, and countless others, were punished twice; first as young mothers, and second as retirees who will receive diminished pension benefits "for the rest of their lives."

You don't have to be good at math to appreciate how timely, and morally troubling, this case is. Women having babies 30 and 40 years ago are reaching retirement age now, alongside many male colleagues who took their own medical leaves with no financial fallout.

They are women like Marilyn Rohlfing, 65, a St. Paul schools social worker hired in 1971 who plans to retire in August.

Rohlfing took two two-year maternity leaves in the 1970s. She knew she wouldn't be paid for her leaves. But losing four years of pension earnings "was the most punishing thing. I felt grateful to have this job and summers off with my sons," Rohlfing said. "But I took a huge hit in my retirement benefits."

It's difficult to get a handle on just how much money is at stake, although lawyer Steve Sprenger, of Sprenger & Lang, based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., took a stab at it.

"The average amount of maternity leave back then was, what, two or three months? Let's say a woman had three or four children. Maybe it's a year's worth of service credit on a pension, multiplied by how many women? It's not an insignificant amount," Sprenger said.

His father, who founded the law firm specializing in workplace discrimination, told him about one major Twin Cities company that used to distinguish job candidates by pink or blue applications. "I don't think the court's decision is in line with the way most people think the world ought to be."

It is possible that some progressive companies treated pregnancy leave as standard medical leave. It's safe to assume, though, that most just followed the rules.

While calling the Supreme Court ruling "tremendously unfair to these women," Minneapolis trial attorney Linda Holstein appreciates how dicey retroactivity can be.

"To go back in time and say, 'You know, sorry, the law changed and you're going to have to pay the price' ... you're balancing fairness to the employers with unfairness to the women. The reason this is so poignant and painful is that we're talking about a law that's been on the books since 1979. That's 30 years. This little subclass of females who had babies then, do they have to be punished again? It seems like the pregnancy discrimination law has been around for so long that they could have made an exception."

Shirley Chase, a St. Anthony attorney and former commissioner in the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry, also believes the case could have, and should have, gone the other way. "The heart of the [women's] case is that there are present effects of past discrimination. It's a roundabout thing but, essentially, can you rely on service records now that were discriminatory then? By using those records, it's current gender discrimination. Obviously, the court didn't agree."

Her suggestion to retiring women? Get yourselves -- quickly -- to your benefits office and ask a lot of questions.

Gail Rosenblum • 612-673-7350 • gail.rosenblum@startribune.com